Students doing video analysis of everyday motion can be a great way to bring physics into the real world. Due to the quality of some videos, they are sometimes difficult to analyze. Here are some tips for recording good videos for analysis:

Support the phone or camera to keep it still. Use a tripod, tape the phone to a box, or find another way to avoid the shakiness of hand-held video. This will also prevent the tendency to follow the motion with the camera.

Record the event in a well-lit area. Outdoors in daylight is the ideal environment, as even an overcast sky can provide more light than can be found indoors. However, going outside is not always practical. Old overhead projectors can provide a bright light that has no flicker, even when filming in high speed. The brighter the lighting, the less motion blur you will see in the video.

Position the camera so the line of sight is normal to the plane of motion. Ideally, all the motion would take place at a constant distance from the camera, but that is nearly impossible to achieve. Therefore, arrange the scene to have as little distance variation as possible. This is to make sure the scale you choose applies to as much of the motion as possible.

Place a ruler, meter stick, or other scale item in the same plane as the motion being recorded. Having the scale object at that same distance eliminates parallax error in scaling.